Despite a visibly degrading job market and widespread anxiety around AI automation, empirical evidence definitively linking the two phenomena has been hard to come by. Until now, at least.
New reporting by the Financial Times details two new sources of data pointing to AI’s impact on the labor market.
First, there was a new analysis by US-based financial researcher Eric Basmajian, who recently wrote in a post on social media that “AI productivity gains are showing up” in jobs data — with the caveat that only about 15 percent of jobs seem to be impacted so far.
“The three heaviest AI adopters (information, professional services, finance) went from a 2.2 percent productivity trend to 5.0 percent since 2022,” Basmajian explained, pointing to incremental gains in workplace productivity coinciding with a high AI adoption rate.
The very next day after Basmajian’s post, what appears to be an internal Goldman Sachs report began circulating on social media. It warned that the “AI labor market impact” has been spreading beyond tech work — a field that has already been hit hard as generative AI becomes a common tool for writing software code.
The report shows a rising trend between an industry’s AI exposure and unemployment around non-tech professional sectors like finance, telecomms, technical services, and administration, seemingly reinforcing Basmajian’s assertion.
But while there does seem to be a positive trendline in at least some areas of the job market, the FT tacks on a veritable laundry list of disclaimers.
Perhaps most importantly, the metrics looking at “productivity” in these cases aren’t necessarily reflective of quality — meaning we’re not necessarily talking about skyrocketing productive output and revenue as a result of AI, but of lower headcount, which is a big difference.
The data is also specifically about the US, pointing to broader post-Pandemic economic woes rather than a global AI jobpocalypse. As the FT explains, the “link that was visible in the US between AI usage on the one hand, and productivity growth and falling employment on the other, is conspicuously absent elsewhere.”
Either way, it seems the AI doomers finally have something to write home about as far as the labor market is concerned — though anyone preparing their bunker for a hypothetical AI labor revolution is going to have to keep on waiting.
More on AI and labor: Support for Unions Is Spiking as AI Threatens Jobs
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